


being born is going blind

by destronomics



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Genre Twist, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-25
Updated: 2009-11-25
Packaged: 2017-10-03 17:25:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destronomics/pseuds/destronomics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's not going to give her name and Doc Bones is Easy Company so he's a certified expert at making do. (WWII AU, McCoy/Chapel)</p>
            </blockquote>





	being born is going blind

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [kink_meme](http://community.livejournal.com/st_xi_kink/4104.html) of DOOM. DOOOOOooom. Changes POV for some reason half way through, but it was late and a kink_meme and um. It was late. Total and utter crack.

She doesn't give him her name because she, as she puts it, has better things to do in times of crisis than exchange pleasantries with fool field medics who couldn't even tourniquet properly. He reminded her that his unit had been too busy getting shelled to shit to do anything properly, much less save the blasted leg, and it was cauterize or lose the whole man and fuck you if she thought she could do better, he dared her to do better, and did he have to remind her he's a doctor and not a goddamn deity?

"No, but you need to get out of my way so I can clean up your mess." He grumbles (he always grumbles) but gets out of her way (he always does -- it's becoming a god awful habit.) He'd chalks it up as a sign of how badly mishandled the war is going when a nurse gets away with that kind of lip, but he's not that kind of stupid.

She's a nurse and she works in a chapel so it's the easiest thing in the world. She's not going to give her name and Doc Bones is Easy Company so he's a certified expert at making do. "Nurse Chapel" it is and he gets it to stick for the rest of the company too, just to be a dick about it.

She doesn't forgive him for that, but still doesn't relent on the name thing so it's their little stalemate for those weeks he's in and out of Bastgone ferrying his people who were too good to keep away from the front. At least that's the excuse from higher up and Bones would love to question that fucked logic to their faces.

It's not that she's not shapely or that she's uneasy on the eyes -- she's damn sturdy, he's seen it himself when the morphine was low and she has to hold a kid down so they don't kill themselves even more. Sometimes he sees bruises dot up and down the skin on her arms and Bones doesn't have the heart to pick a fight with her even if it kicks up that spark in his chest that reminds him he's still breathing, still alive.

That the broken and shattered moans of his fellow soldiers aren't a sign that he died somewhere equally stupid and that this is hell. That he deserved damnation for not being better at stemming the flow into this miserable afterlife. For being such a piss poor doctor in a piss poor war, and letting kids young enough to be his own die sniveling for mom and pops and the family fucking dog. For leaving Joanna even more alone in the world.

She might be a little on the plain-side, sure, all blond and pale and washed out, but he'd bet a half a week of rations that she'd clean up pretty damn well -- free of the gore and grime she might pass for decent, and pretty. Happy instead of. Well.

She's hardly a nurse anymore, hardly close, elbow deep in a GI thrashing on the table and calling her "mommy" and "mother" and "bitch, you fucking bitch, oh god it _hurts_, why does it--"

Bastogne's been cut off for what feels like centuries. Low on anything that matters: plasma, bandages, doctors. It's what you get for billeting all your goddamn medics in an actual hospital, close to actual facilities designed to make an impossible job less impossible. You ask Scotty of the 3rd Battalion and he'll tell you the Krauts did it on purpose, not fully bombing that particular facility on their way out. "A siren song and we bloody well cat-called for an encore."

Spock had agreed, said cold and calm, that it made smart, tactical sense, and if Kirk was already half up out of his chair to stop McCoy from putting his fist through the Jew bastard's equally smart mouth, well, a commander knew his men. Spock hadn't even seemed to register any of it per usual, face unrepentant and unsurprised and McCoy found out than that he could really hate someone more than the Krauts. Not Spock, no, that was a given, but Kirk for stopping him.

Empty of doctors, Bastogne had to learn to make do like Easy Company, and that meant Nurse Chapel and her eerie steady hands and her sharp tongue and her unflagging insistence that he treat her like an equal. A bombed out ghost town filled with the dead and dying and nurses with god complexes greater than his own.

If this was Hell, the Devil had a pretty wicked sense of humor.

Here Nurse Chapel is a doctor, better than, and she doesn't smile at her nickname for her, but she won't kick you out either when she's fist deep in a man you sometimes call friend when you're not calling him stupid and infantile and--

Mostly you're raving and angry and scared.

After, her hands are as bloody as yours were coming in, and she snorts when you point out: "We match."

You are surprised at the sound of your own voice, then, wavering and a touch scared and yeah. You have to take that moment where her snort turns into a pained giggle, and then into a real, honest-to-god belly laugh to realize you were scared. You were really scared and there was a good long stretch of time there where you didn't think you'd be able to go back to the line a sane man.

When you come back to yourself, Chapel has stopped laughing and is staring at you. She turns away from a moment, rummaging through a pile of things rusted, unsanitary and with the gall to be called "supplies," pulls out a moderately clean rag. She wipes at your hands first, and then hers, and when she's done, you still match: pale skin and fingernails rimmed with red.

She pats your shoulder and that's the sign that the moment is over and he can go now back to his friends, the people he respects because they earned it, not because you're forced to, with her.

But you don't move.

You crowd into her space until her hip hits the table behind her and then you're slanting your mouth over hers and running your tongue along the seam of her lips and then kissing her. She lets you, keeps letting you until you try to get a hand up her skirt and she shudders so hard you feel her teeth chatter against yours. You're not a monster, not yet, so you pull back and stare.

Her eyes are glassy and lips wet from your tongue and she says, "I took off my ring when I started doing surgeries. I have--" She closes her eyes, takes a rattled breath, "Had. I had a husband. I can't--"

You had checked for a ring, long before, when this all was just damned inconvenient and new, because you are a bastard and your wife left you for a reason but her eyes are still dark and on you and her thighs still frame your legs and your hand is still on her hip so when she bites her lip and nods, you pull your hand down back to her knee then back up her skirt and work a finger, then two, then three into her. She rocks against your hand, her mouth is warm against your neck, and when she comes around your fingers she's wet enough.

She lets you fuck her and when you're done, when you're gasping and spent and weak, she lets you kiss her so you can show her, so she can know that this isn't, it's not, she isn't--

One week later the chapel she turned into a hospital gets bombed to rubble and the nurse that ran it like Hitler's own, had practically lived in there, the last few weeks, and no one ever caught a name, just 'Chapel' everyone just called her 'Chapel' no idea why, and wasn't that darkly funny and fitting and oh god. Oh god. This is it for you, you think, this is what you do now. This is who you have to be.

You knew better, once.


End file.
